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  • Representation and Resistance: South Asian and African Women's Texts at Home and in the Diaspora
  • Anastasia Christou (bio)
Representation and Resistance: South Asian and African Women's Texts at Home and in the Diaspora. By Jaspal Kaur Singh. Calgary: U of Calgary P, 2008. 220 pp.

In an epoch characterized by massive global transformations that have had a dramatic impact on local socioeconomic and cultural lives, we nevertheless continue to negotiate concepts of gender identities stemming from colonial constructions of national consciousness. In articulating such textual and visual representations of homing and diasporic lives, scholars and researchers in postcolonial, ethnic, racial, diasporic, and migration studies will find that Singh's comparative study of Western-educated African and South Asian women writers provides an in-depth critical analysis of transnational, cultural-diasporic spaces of resistance emergent in a globalized era and apparent in women writers', filmmakers', and artists' renditions of identification and homing.

Stemming from an autobiographical-narrative perspective in seeking the self while understanding the other, Singh extends her auto-ethnography, as a useful reflective analytical lens, into exploring fragments of meanings of post/modernity and frameworks of resistance to a co-opted hegemony of globalization that has fiercely dismantled the lives of many women (and men) in the Global South. As the author indicates, "I have been seeking. My search has led me to many parts of the world. Navigating various cosmologies, ideologies and economies, first in Burma, then in India, Iraq, and now in the United States, I am mindful of words, meanings, and truths" (xi). As the outcome of a reflexive journey that is textual, cultural, and personal, this book is the culmination of such critical inquiries into the voices of postcolonial female Indian and African women writers as well as the journeys of their representational subjects. The book unveils the conflictual and fragmentary fluid lives of women at the crossroads of tradition and modernity, East and West, globalization and locality, that also reveals their lives in a rhetoric of "madness" in gendering relations of postcoloniality and their ideological penetration by globalization. At the same time, the book critiques universalisms of gender identity construction and transformation as being contextual, situated and located within transnational cultural spaces of the first world but also necessitating an inclusion of a diversity of female voices from both the Global South and the Global North. [End Page 302] Hence, in reading postcolonial women's texts we need to readdress the politics of location embedded with transnational feminist critical practices in order to subvert the dominance of national oppressive and global-cultural scripted lives and narrations. What Singh proposes is a rewriting and a renaming of structures of oppression within the postcolonial and global frameworks, in order to resist them as an alternative strategy of recasting identities. Singh advocates for the participation of postcolonial women writers in the dismantling of such structures, a participation that goes beyond relocation to a supposed "liberating" West. This is the way such women writers can assist in raising consciousness and contribute toward changing institutional structures.

The book develops these key arguments through an analysis of the women writers' and artists' contributions in ten chapters that deal with cultural alienation, female sexuality, cultural belonging, queer diasporas, and transnational politics of representation.

Chapter One provides a background to the study by introducing the postcolonial women writers and their cultural productions in contemporary, transnational, postcolonial spaces. The author situates the women's voices within the oppositional forces of locality and globality, East and West, while illuminating the cosmopolitan knowledge of those writers, which has led to a misreading of their texts and thus has contributed to the sustaining disempowerment of people in the Global South. The author is reflectively aware of female narrative voices that inhabit privileged spaces despite their commitment to investigating colonial and patriarchal spaces. Here lies the salient feature of the author's analysis that locates such voices within particularities of conflictual spaces but urges a critique through the cultural politics of place. This is unavoidably correlated to the ultimate question of a reflective politics in academia: How do we not only read but also teach such texts as politically conscious academics and engaged...

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